So What?
The damn thing was secret and private…..
There is probably hundreds of the same things….
(This one is actually a ‘gaming out’ of Trump vs Biden and it contains some crazy assed constritutional adjustments)
How many people read them?
Who would act on them?
I’ll post on it…
But as the saying goes….
“Hindsight is 20-20 vision’……
The document is an artifact from a dangerous time: Warning that Trump would surely not concede defeat to Joe Biden, it advised Trump’s opponents to “assume the worst” would follow. It urged them to gird for a struggle not only with the president but with “institutions controlled or influenced by the GOP, including the courts.” The document forecast “militia and white supremacist activities through the inauguration — and, very likely, accelerated activity in the early months of a Biden administration.”
Plan D is sobering reading even today. It is a catalog of the defects in America’s electoral process and political culture that made it vulnerable to a rampaging demagogue— defects that some Democrats wanted to fix with drastic measures.
Should Biden lose narrowly, the report said, “layers of illegitimate structures and interventions will have contributed to it.” It closed with a warning against complacency even if Trump were to be defeated.
“A Biden win will not prove that our democracy is healthy,” the document argued, continuing: “Win, lose, or draw, we should perceive ourselves not in a singular moment of crisis but rather in what may be an era of existential challenge for American democracy.”
I first read the report soon after it was composed, when a source shared it as an off-the-record analysis to inform my thinking about 2020. At the time, I thought it was a creative assessment of potential worst-case scenarios, some of which struck me as rather remote. The January 6 insurrection was still months away.
In any event, I found Plan D more compelling than contemporaneous Democratic planning exercises that seemed more like high-concept role play for political elites. My colleague Sam Stein, then at The Daily Beast, reported on one “simulation” that foresaw the Biden campaign urging the entire West Coast to secede in a unit known as “Cascadia.” Simulation indeed.
Plan D was no game. It was devised as a battle plan. Reviewing the report years later, it is impossible not to be struck by the sense of urgency in the text — and the speed with which the impatient demand for fundamental change to American politics has dissipated among most Democrats…..
…
The good news in Plan D is contained in passages where its authors missed the mark: their warning, for instance, that the conservative judiciary might aid Trump’s election sabotage (it did not) or the suggestion that Democrats might need to give Trump amnesty from prosecution to ease the transfer of power (multiple ongoing investigations of Trump show otherwise).
Most encouraging may be what the report misjudged about how the business of legislating would unfold under Biden. Unless the filibuster were abolished, the document warned, Biden’s agenda could meet a miserable death in “Mitch McConnell’s legislative graveyard.” Plan D judged it largely futile to seek bipartisan compromise, since whatever Democrats do, “Republicans will accuse us of murder, socialism and worse.”
That last part is true of many Republicans. On the whole, the GOP remains an angry, Trumpy party. Yet some — including McConnell — joined with Democrats to pass a hefty infrastructure law, an aggressive industrial policy for the high-tech sector and more. Even with the structure of the Senate and the courts still firmly in place, Democrats still managed to enact a landmark climate law that has unleashed a global clean-energy arms race….
Note….
I agree with the part about the final outcome for Trump could be a deal to not put him in jail after convictions, if he doesn’t come back into politics…..